Aaron Sherman wrote:
I don't have hard numbers, but when we moved our Oracle database from direct-attached A1000 (dedicated diff. SCSI controler) to a filer we saw a large join that used to take 3 hours drop to 20 minutes
I can believe that. The A1000s are really ropey things for a number of reasons. Firstly the sun differential scsi controller is a qlogic isp1000 which netapp stopped using (except for tape drives) about 3 years ago and was never the fastest card around. I was never convinced that Suns driver got the best out of the card at that. Secondly the raid controller is one OEMd from metastor (LSIlogic) which they themselves discontinued about 3 years ago using a Pentium 75 for the parity calculations. We find writes go about 5* faster onto a filer than they do onto A1000s/D1000s, reads are only around 2* faster though.